The Singing Earth: Adventures From A World Of Music

By Barrett Martin

The Singing Earth is a collection of musical adventure stories from Grammy-winning producer, composer, and writer Barrett Martin. The book chronicles Martin's musical work in 14 different musical regions, across 6 continents, over the course of 30 years. It starts with his involvement in the 1990's Seattle music scene, and then explores son

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sunyata Books
• Release date: Jun 24, 2017
• ISBN: 9780692188514

Barrett Martin

Barrett Martin is a Grammy-winning producerwho recorded and toured with the Screaming Trees for over a decade. He holds a master's degree in ethnomusicology and linguistics and has written four books about music and culture around the world, as well as several short stories that have been published in magazines and as album liner notes. His work as a producer, drummer, percussionist, and composer can be heard on over 150 albums, including several film and television soundtracks. His ethnomusicology work has taken him to six continents and numerous countries, winning Latin Grammys and writing awards along the way. When he's not traveling, he lives in Olympia, Washington with his wife, Dr. Lisette Garcia, where they oversee a recording studio and a music and film production company.

Book preview

VERSE 1

SEATTLE: THE LEADEN SKIES OF GRUNGE

Thin Men on a Seattle rooftop, 1988. Left to right: Barrett Martin, Ben Floresca, Tom Gnoza, Pat Pedersen

Do not pray for an easy life, pray for the strength to endure a difficult one.

—Bruce Lee

I have to acknowledge that my musical career would have had a much different trajectory if I hadn’t had the good fortune of growing up in the Pacific Northwest, and then moving to Seattle right as a verdant musical scene was just starting to grow. Dozens of books and countless newspapers and magazine articles have devoted their pages to the Seattle music scene, so my addition to the commentary is more of a personal one, the way I experienced it. By the time I arrived in Seattle in 1987, there had already been nearly a century of musical innovation going on in the Pacific Northwest. The alternative music revolution that I was a part of was just one style of music in a very long tradition of great music that has emanated from the forests, mountains, basements, and bars of this very special place. It must also be said that this musical region is not just limited to Seattle, but extends from Vancouver, BC in the north, all the way to Portland, Oregon in the south, and includes many smaller towns and communities in between. Music up here in the PNW is a way of life. We live and breathe it, and it defines our character in the most unique of ways.

It really started with the Coast Salish Indigenous tribes, which are numerous and noted by the early pioneers for their drumming, dancing, and singing abilities. Much later, in the early 20th century, came the blues and jazz of the Mississippi Delta, which transplanted itself on to Jackson Street in downtown Seattle in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. I’ve spent a fair amount of time in the Mississippi Delta and have noticed many similarities between the Delta and the Pacific Northwest. And perhaps that’s why the working class roots of blues and jazz have always had such a strong foothold up here. Because like the Mississippi Delta, Washington State has a huge river running through it, the Columbia River, which supports the agricultural and shipping economy between eastern and western Washington. And like the delta region, the Northwest is peppered with small working class towns that survive on everything from farming, to forestry, to fishing, and the same small businesses that every little town has. I also think there’s a natural salt-of-the-earth feeling that exists in both regions, where the people love the land, the waterways, and the natural habitats that exist in these places. As a result, very distinct styles of music have emerged in both the Mississippi Delta and Washington State, and even if the branches of the tree have diverged, the roots go back to the same source—Indigenous and African American music mixed with a working class ethos.

In the 1950s, rock & roll emerged here, there, and everywhere, almost simultaneously, followed by its various offshoots: garage rock, hard rock, punk, and grunge. Despite its geographical isolation, the Northwest has always been very hip to American musical trends, often being at the forefront. There’s no real explanation for why the Northwest, and Seattle in particular, has created so many great musicians and bands over the decades, but I suspect it may be a combination of an educated and musically savvy population, a high literacy rate, and the sometimes-gloomy weather, which tends to make us hunker down and practice our music and songwriting skills.

The decade of the 1990s has been somewhat mislabeled as the grunge era when, in fact, there were so many musical styles emerging at the same time, it would be better to describe it as the alternative decade. The alternative movement, like punk and hip hop before it, came out of a distinctive way of life that mirrored the blue-collar, working class culture of the Northwest. Grunge was about being an authentic human being as well as a musician, and like the blues, grunge was about wearing your work clothes on stage, instead of the lace and spandex that was coming out of Los Angeles and all over MTV at the time. Grunge always had more in common with the working man than it ever did with Hollywood. It was a musical slap back, and our philosophy was that music is a form of community after a hard day’s work, rather than a slick product of the corporate labels and MTV, although soon enough, we would find ourselves on corporate labels and MTV as well.

Grunge was simply a localized extension of a musical ethos that had been building in the Northwest for decades, and by the early 1990s, it hit a nuclear moment. Even our workmen’s attire of flannel and denim went from the construction site, to the nightclubs and the fashion houses of New York and Paris, almost as fast as the music invaded the airwaves of radio.

I certainly don’t claim to know the whole story of grunge, nor would I attempt an exhaustive history of it. I experienced a small slice of it, so my approach is to give my first-hand experience, being as accurate and faithful to the historic details as I possibly can. These stories will perhaps give an overall view of musical life in Seattle at the time, along with some important events that I was witness to. It really started with my adolescence in Washington’s capital city, Olympia, about an hour south of Seattle.

I was born in the old St. Peters hospital in Olympia in April of 1967, a few months shy of the Summer Of Love. I lived the first year of my life in an Airstream trailer and in the tail section of small airplanes, which my father and grandfather flew around as part of their job. This absolutely explains the wanderlust I developed as a young man, something I have never been able to shake off.

I was raised in a loving but strict, hard-working Irish American family that was peppered with musical and poetic talents amongst the various relatives. Both sides of my family came from very modest means, but they all valued the importance of hard work, and if possible, a higher education. My father’s father, Papa Amos, had been a mechanic for the local Bell telephone company, and although his formal education ended with trade school, he was well-read and often quoted Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and the Old Testament. I remember him being a voracious crossword puzzle solver, as he sat in his giant leather armchair after a hard day’s work under the hoods of the Bell fleet. My grandmother, Marjorie, had been born in a hospital tent in a logging camp in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas before her family moved to Washington State to work in the forests of the timber-rich Olympic Peninsula. I suppose those genetic links to the American South would also explain a certain love I have for that part of the country.

My mother’s side of the family were Irish immigrants who had been Midwestern farmers that lived in sod houses literally made of the Earth. That grandfather, Papa Dean, was part Cherokee Indian and he started a flying career shortly after his service in WWII, marrying my grandmother at the young age of 17. That grandmother, Mary Carol, was the matriarch of the family, and she was proud of the fact that she was a blood descendant of the 2nd American president, John Adams, which made me a descendant too. She loved to quote writers like Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, and Robert Frost in between her stern lectures on moral and ethical responsibility. My family likes to do that, mixing their poetics and moral platitudes, and that explains everything about my family.

My entire extended family from both sides lived in Olympia, and it was a wonderful way to grow up, having both sets of grandparents around. My dad, Brian, started out as a flight instructor with my grandfather’s business, but he ended up joining an entirely new profession when he started working in the field of industrial explosives, which created huge debates when I became more of an environmentalist. My mom, Deana, was a homemaker initially and a superb cook, and she maintained two huge gardens on either side of our woodland home, the rows of which we weeded and maintained constantly.

At family gatherings, we always played music around an old player piano that my dad had bought at a garage sale. It was from the late 1800s and this was really my first live music experience—a pedal pumped piano that played old-timey music from rolls of perforated paper that directed air from the billows to the keys. My sister, Amy, pumped the pedals, I played along on my rickety old drum set (also from a garage sale), my brother Brandon played a trombone, and occasionally someone else would play a guitar or a harmonica. Everyone sang along in unison to the words printed on the sheets of the piano roll paper as it rolled by.

During our high school years, I had friends from the jazz ensemble who would come by with their horns to play along with our trusty piano as we scrolled through songs from the ragtime, big band, swing, and show tune eras. We had a stereo and a turntable too, where my dad would spin Willie Nelson and other outlaw country artists, but we spent more time around that old player piano than anything else. When I write about it now, it sounds like something my great-grandparents would have done in the 1800s, and likely they did. But this was Olympia, Washington in the late 1970s and 80s, and since the Internet wouldn’t exist for another 20 years, a good time at our house was just homemade food, live music, and the company of friends and neighbors who loved to come and sing classic songs at the Martin homestead.

The radio stations back then were still playing most of the popular music of the 1960s and 70s on both the AM and FM channels, which was essentially the hits of Motown, Stax, and classic rock—basically music rooted in the blues. New wave music, the later child of punk, was just starting to have success on the newly launched MTV. It was a fascinating and often amusing time to be absorbing music because it was so diverse. My first love was really jazz, largely because of that player piano and also because of a large collection of 78 rpm records that my grandparents had given to me. It was all big band and swing music, music of WWII America. It was also the music that we played in our junior high and high school jazz ensembles, so that was my initial love. But then my rock & roll Aunt Mary gave me my first collection of inherited vinyl, which were classics like The Who’s Tommy, Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, some Rolling Stones albums, The Beatles and Bob Dylan, and a few others that I can’t remember. The one I played the most was Elvis’ Greatest Hits, and it was on a cassette tape, which I played endlessly until the tape began to warble with magnetic fatigue.

Those rock albums changed everything, and pretty quickly I realized that music was a whole bunch of other things I hadn’t even thought about yet, and I started to get really excited.

Around the same period of time, I got my first job working for a local ranch owner building a new fence line, which involved stretching barbed wire nailed to fence posts that we had dug out and set by hand. It was hard, sweaty, dusty work, and I was only about 14 at the time, but it really helped to build my work ethic. My next job after that was a full-time job as a busboy at a local hotel called the Tyee Motor Inn. I would go to school in the mornings, and then straight to the Tyee afterwards, where I would put in at least an 8 hour day, and sometimes more. I liked the job mostly because of the people I worked with, but also because I liked the idea of a place where people came and went, from all over the country and even the world.

I earned enough money from the busboy job that I was able to buy my first real, professional drum set. It was a used, black Tama kit, made in Japan, and it came with a couple cymbals stands, a set of hi-hats, and a couple of old, tarnished Zildjian cymbals. I’d been playing that small, beat up, garage sale drum set for years, but this Tama kit was the real thing. I set about making a practice space for myself in the hayloft of our barn, and with a very basic turntable and a set of headphones, I would play along to my jazz and rock record collection.

As I got older and continued to buy LPs, my musical taste expanded to include Led Zeppelin, Rush, and the Police, which were the bands with the greatest rock drummers. I still loved the jazz because of the freedom and expressiveness in the playing, but rock and new wave started to influence my playing. I found all of it to be truly great music, so the genres were irrelevant, and I’ve found that by keeping an open mind, that has allowed me to discover new forms of music over the course of my life, and I think that’s kind of what it’s all about if you’re a real musician.

I played in the school bands all through primary, junior high, high school, and eventually college, but it was really my high school band director, Denny Womac, who inspired me to keep playing drums professionally. Mr. Womac had been a Marine, but he was also a superb trumpet and flugelhorn player who inspired his students by telling us funny, anecdotal stories while playing along with us in the jazz ensemble. It was a far more compelling way to teach music, as opposed to yelling at us, as one might expect from a Marine. Instead, Mr. Womac inspired us with his kind example, which is of course, the best type of teacher. But he also made us work hard, and he taught us to pay attention to the subtle details, which is the secret to excellent musicianship. We learned all the jazz classics, from the big band swing of Count Basie and Duke Ellington, to the bebop of Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, to the cool jazz of Miles Davis and John Coltrane, and even the fusion of Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock, which was part of the still-evolving jazz fusion of the time.

I also played upright and electric bass for the first two years of my high school jazz career, because there was already a drummer seated in the band. I later switched to drums for my junior and senior years, and this is the accidental reason why I understand the art of the rhythm section as deeply as I do—it was that dual training on both the drums and the bass, which continued into college. The Tumwater Thunderbird High School Jazz Ensemble was a very good jazz band, indeed. We could sight-read music on the spot and play it very well—well enough that we were hired to play all around the Northwest at local festivals and town events. In many ways, the Thunderbird jazz band was my first real touring band, and I loved it when we went out on the road for a weekend of gigs. We got to eat in restaurants and stay in motel rooms, and I think that’s probably when the road bug bit me.

There were also a few very powerful live performances that I saw in those impressionable high school years, the first and most memorable being with my friend and fellow jazz band trumpet player, Jim Lindgren. He bought tickets for us to see Ray Charles at the Washington State Fair. I’m pretty sure we played a Ray Charles tune in our jazz repertoire, but seeing Ray live was an entirely different experience. Somehow our tickets put us right in the front row, right in front of Ray’s piano, and it was like getting a private performance from the great master himself. I can still see it in my mind’s eye, Ray Charles swaying back and forth on his piano bench as he sang the great Hoagy Carmichael classic, Georgia on My Mind.

Another great concert I witnessed was during the annual fundraiser for our jazz band, where we would promote a show with a national-level jazz artist and then keep the profits for our touring budget. During my senior year in 1985, we hired the Count Basie Big Band, but a week before the show, the Count took ill and had to cancel. In his stead he sent the great Cab Calloway to sing with his big band, which was actually an even bigger event. Cab was most famous for his role in the movie The Blues Brothers, where he sang his hit Minnie the Moocher, and he sang it again perfectly that night with the Count Basie Big Band. After the show I got to meet and talk with Cab Calloway, and he was such a kind and elegant gentleman—it was like shaking hands with history.

I went off to college shortly after that, for two years of classical and jazz training at Western Washington University in Bellingham, about three hours north of Olympia. I had both a music and academic scholarship, but I still had to work at my hotel job during the holidays and summer breaks, so I could earn enough money to pay the bills. I was also itching to see the world, so I signed up for a study abroad program in my sophomore year. During the summer before the trip, I worked two jobs: one was the late night shift at the hotel, and another was the early morning shift at the explosives factory where my father was now an executive. It was an intense summer, making explosives by day and clearing tables by night, and I think I only slept about two hours a night, which one can do when you’re only 19 and about to fly to Europe for the first time.

By fall quarter of 1986, I was on a flight to Rome, the first foreign city that I had ever visited, and the source of all Western civilization. It was perfectly poetic, and after a couple of weeks in Rome, Florence, Venice, and Milan, we drove north to England where our class would settle in London. We were in a humanities program that focused on playwriting and theatrical performance, and there I saw dozens of plays and musical performances. One of the concerts that stood out as a life-changing event was when I saw the legendary Spanish guitarist, Andrés Segovia, perform at the equally legendary Royal Albert Hall. I went with another American student who I had a crush on, and we sat just a few rows back from the great master himself. Segovia was 93 years old at the time of that concert, and he played for a very long time with no microphone on his guitar. It was all-acoustic, just as it would have been a century earlier. You could have heard a pin drop in the Royal Albert Hall, which held more than 5,000 people and was completely sold out, but it was utterly silent as Segovia played his exquisite guitar. Again, it was like experiencing history.

Seeing and hearing Segovia play was about the third time I had seen a true master perform his art, and that deeply changed me. I was only 19, but from then onward I had an extremely high bar of what I thought true musical excellence should be. It wasn’t just about music or fame—it was about looking for excellence in any art form.

A few weeks later, our class moved north to Stratford-upon-Avon for the opening of the annual Shakespeare festival. There I saw a young Jeremy Irons in the role of King Leontes in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. Irons is a master actor now, but when I saw him in 1986, he was only 38 and still making his bones. I also saw the force-of-nature actor, Anthony Hopkins, in the lead role of Pravda, which is about a South African newspaper magnate roughly based on the archetype of William Randolph Hearst. Hopkins was only 49 at the time, and he still hadn’t really become the Hollywood star that he is today.

These musicians and actors were masters in the making, and you could see from their stage presence that they had an entirely different quality than most performers. Since then, I’ve come to realize how rare the right stuff actually is, especially in the 21st century where cheap fame and celebrity is deemed more important than supreme skill and the desire to master an art form. But fake celebrity doesn’t last very long, and the real masters eventually have their names inscribed in books, on sheet music, in films, and the recorded mediums. They eventually become immortal.

Seeing masters like Ray Charles, Cab Calloway, Andrés Segovia, Jeremy Irons, and Anthony Hopkins affected me deeply, especially because I wanted to be an artist too. And when one sees true mastery in any form, it’s both humbling and inspiring at the same time, because it sets a new standard of how good you have to be among the best. Later in my musical career, I would witness other masters such as Johnny Cash, the Pakistani singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, and the Indian sitar master Ravi Shankar. So when I go out to see a show featuring a young artist who is just starting their career, I always look for that right stuff and I remind myself that I might be watching history again.

After completing two years of college in sleepy Bellingham, WA, I was ready to move to the big city of Seattle. I got accepted at the University Of Washington and I transferred there in the summer of 1987. Call it fate or bad luck, but because of my status as a transfer student, I wasn’t able to get any of the classes that I needed to stay in the music program. It was as if formal music training was shutting me out, making a decision for me that I hadn’t been able to make for myself. Thus, I decided to take a year off just to work and reassess my academic strategy. That year became a 15-year hiatus from academia where music would show me most of the world.

Living in Seattle in 1987 was an exciting time for a 21-year-old musician. I can attest that Seattle was not the hipster-dwelling, tech-driven, micro-brewed, coffee-infused, gentrified city that it has become today. Back in the 1980s and 90s, Seattle was a gritty town where the biggest industries were Boeing Aerospace, Weyerhaeuser Lumber, and the commercial fishing fleet. Microsoft was just getting started, and I used to get my coffee at the very first Starbucks shop in the Pike Place Market. It wasn’t a boomtown by any stretch.

But Seattle is a big college town, with several universities and community colleges in a relatively small area, so our city has a very educated, literate, music-loving, artistic community that proved to be very supportive of the music that was emerging in the late 1980s. This was, and still is, the greatest strength of the original Seattleite—our support of the local community, its music, and the creative class in general.

Around the same time, the last glimmering waves of punk rock were still rippling across cities around the United States, and they too were issuing an amplified call to attention. Just south of Seattle was San Francisco and its label, Alternative Tentacles, which gave us the psychedelic experimentations of the Butthole Surfers, as well as the sarcastic punk of the Dead Kennedys. The Los Angeles punk scene had its own label, SST Records based in Long Beach, and they gave us the primal rage of Black Flag, the jazz punk of the Minutemen, the angular pop of the Meat Puppets, the psychedelic rock of Screaming Trees, the wall of noise of Sonic Youth, and the deafening roar of Soundgarden.

Then there was Twin/Tone Records in Minneapolis, which was kind of a sister city to Seattle with a like-minded rust belt attitude. Twin/ Tone gave us the disheveled beauty of the Replacements, the jagged pop of Soul Asylum, the sonic industrialism of Hüsker Dü, and one of the greatest all-girl bands, Babes In Toyland. Farther east was Chicago and its unique brand of industrial music, which gave us the label Touch and Go and Steve Albini’s eardrum-bursting Big Black, the art punk of Scratch Acid, and its later incarnation, The Jesus Lizard.

All the way east in Boston came the indie pop of Galaxie 500, the slacker rock of Dinosaur Jr., and one of the most influential bands of all time, the Pixies, whose sound was a unique blend of punk, pop, and a primordial rage that nodded at grunge before the term had even been coined.

Moving south to Washington, D.C. was another vibrant music scene with Dischord Records giving us the hardcore pioneers Minor Threat, and its later incarnation Fugazi. Farther down the east coast was a little scene in Chapel Hill, NC that gave us Superchunk and the extraordinarily successful label that the band started called, Merge Records. Merge went on to release many important albums of that time. Exactly opposite of Seattle, in the far southeast corner of the country was Athens, GA, one of the earliest indie music scenes in America. Athens gave us Pylon, the B-52s, and the legendary R.E.M., who played house parties in that picturesque college town until their success went global. Peter Buck, the founding guitarist of R.E.M., would later move to Seattle during our own emerging scene, where he befriended me and became a collaborator on multiple albums.

By 1987-88, Seattle was finally reaching its own tipping point, taking its turn in the spotlight of American indie rock. Many of us remember those last couple years of the 1980s as being perhaps the most exciting time of all. But back in 1987, I was a college dropout with no formal training in anything other than music, and even that had been truncated by academic bureaucracy. I found myself working in construction where I worked on houses for $6.00 an hour, and I lived in an unheated warehouse loft in the International District that cost $250 a month. But at least I could practice my drums in my studio, and I lived rather cheaply. I didn’t really drink and I never used drugs, so my greatest indulgence was taking Kung Fu classes from a Chinese master who had a school in Chinatown, a short walk down the hill from my studio loft. I would practice Kung Fu in the evenings after work, eat a cheap meal at one of the Vietnamese, Chinese, or Japanese restaurants in the neighborhood, and then walk back home to practice my drums. It was a simple, focused period in my life where I